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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association
Landmarks in German Drama. Ed. by PETER HUTCHINSON. (British and Irish Studies in German Language and Literature, 27) Oxford, Bern, and Berlin: Peter Lang. 2002. 244 pp. 26 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 3-906766-47-0 (pbk).
Originally delivered as lectures in Cambridge, fourteen contributions focus on individual dramas as 'landmarks'. One omission cries out for comment: where are the comedies (apart from David Midgley's claims made for the final act of Wedekind's Erdgeist with its 'unprecedented combination of farce and tragedy, melodrama and satire' (p.156))? The criterion of 'continuing popularity' (p. 8) cannot justify the failure to include at least one or two German comedies, and might even suggest the inclusion, despite the copious secondary literature, of Wagner's Ring cycle. More importantly, the volume as a whole provides a solid introduction to the significance of works written for performance.
H. B. Nisbet presents Lessing's Nathan der Weise as 'A Landmark in the History of Tolerance'. He explains why the play was written to 'symbolise a future state in which the human family at large will be united in peace and concord' (p. 13). Nisbet effectively refutes negative criticism of Lessing for hostility to revealed religion or intolerance; Lessing emerges as a sceptic of language but not of dogma, someone who 'applies systematic doubt, as a heuristic device, to all supposedly unchallengeable doctrines in order to attain ever more adequate formulations and to stimulate further enquiry' (p. 22). Lessing...
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